


Cora the Harvester

by Opaque_Mistake



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Character Death, Corpses, Death, F/F, Feminist Themes, Gen, Medical Procedures, War Boy Culture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-31
Updated: 2015-12-31
Packaged: 2018-05-10 17:11:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5594239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Opaque_Mistake/pseuds/Opaque_Mistake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A War Boy has died soft.  What happens to his body?  Meet the Harvesters, a sisterhood of women living below The Citadel that recycle human bodies into raw materials.  </p><p>This work was inspired by comments from the Fury Road production design team about using goat skin for much of the leather to imitate human skin, and it got me thinking about the ways in which mortuary science would be essential to maintaining The Citadel; both in terms of of converting human corpses into useable material and preventing contamination of the water supply.  Somehow that spun itself into a full length novel exploring the interactions between undertakers and War Boy culture.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Etta's Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fully finished novel with a solid conclusion. Chapters will be released as I finish re-writes and editing. But I promise not to leave you hanging!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Etta's Prologue: Joe Moore's forces take The Citadel, as seen through the eyes of a child.

I remember when The Citadel fell.

Hiding with mama in the underground caverns. The sound of the other women crying softly in fear. The toddlers clinging in confusion to anyone who would comfort them. I was one of the older children, six summers. Old enough to be frightened, too young to be useful.

Papa was aboveground, fighting. Periodically we could hear echoes of war whoops, but then there was screaming and after that a sickening quiet. For a long day it was silent.

It was Lilia who opened the metal door at the entrance to the cavern. I squeezed beside her, curious. Bodies. All I could see was bodies. The stench sent me below, fast.

I didn’t see Papa.

We had lost.

Then they came. Foreign footsteps, unfamiliar voices. They found the door and hell came pouring through. Soldiers, desperate for women. I tried to help shield the the younger children, herding them into a corner, comforting them as best I could while their mothers screamed and cried.

It was the man in the black mask who stopped them. Not for our sake, but for his own. He needed his men’s energy harnessed to his needs, to hold what he’d taken. To turn our former home into a fortress.

And he needed us. Needed us to clean up the corpses. That’s how it all began. That’s when we began recycling the dead.


	2. Ferrying The Dead

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A War Boy has died soft. What happens to his body? Meet the Harvesters, a sisterhood of women living below The Citadel that recycle human bodies into raw materials. 
> 
> One quiet morning, Cora brings an apprentice on her first trip above-ground.

Cora walked quietly down the corridor with Glenna, her head held high, face blank. It was morning, so few people were up. What men were about studiously avoided looking at them as they passed. A few pups, running past on business for their masters, either gaped openly or shrunk into the corners to hide from them. One older boy hissed the word “Dogs”. Cora remained impassive, but she sensed the younger girl at her side tense up. 

Overnight a War Boy had died soft. That was what they called it, when the men died of tumors or bad blood at The Citadel. A good death was a glorious death in battle. Dying soft meant their body would return to the ground as blood meal that would nourish the plants. Dying soft meant their skin would be tanned into soft leather and used in tools and vehicles. Dying soft meant bones stacked neatly in the Ossuary with their brothers, skulls picked clean for decorations, femurs and tibias eventually ground into bone meal. Dying soft meant their bodies became the stuff of the future generations of The Citadel. Dying soft meant the Black Sorority would come for their body. 

And these days, the Black Sister that would come was most often Cora. She was a big, powerful woman, who could ferry the dead singlehandedly, down to the cool caverns under the city where her sisters worked. Unafraid of the taunts and glares, she was one of the few who could walk calmly and confidently through the halls of the over-world without flinching in fear. She always brought a companion, though. It added to the mystique if they traveled in pairs, and it was important that the younger girls learned to navigate the caverns to the blood shed on their own. And she felt it was important to help the younger girls understand that this was their place. That while the men may rule it, it belonged just as much to the women who had been here since the time before. And without them, the city couldn’t support the thousands of souls who went about their short little half-lives cringing from the women in black who moved among them.

Silently, she made a right, tapping Glenna’s hand slightly to tell her where they were going. The sisters wouldn’t speak up here. The girl was only 16, born in the caverns, new to walking through the over-world, and Cora didn’t want her to feel lost. She was a quick learner, calm and sturdy, though not tall. Cora hoped she would be able to gain the confidence to move freely among the men. This corridor led eventually to a large open room. Cages were suspended above them. Skinny frail men lounged on rock benches, while a few more robust men, covered in white clay, prayed at a huge metal altar at the back of the space. Cora turned away from the altar and headed instead to a shadowy figure in the dark corner of the room. Glenna shifted to follow her single file. The frail men, stared and flinched as if they were still children. 

“Mechanic” Cora spoke. Her voice was ringing and deep and didn’t quiver. “You have a man for us?” 

For the first time that day, someone in the over-world smiled at her. The tall mangy haired man in a leather apron grinned grotesquely. “Ah! Cora… good to see you girl.” He didn’t acknowledge her companion, which was just as well because Glenna seemed to sink into herself when the man spoke. Cora however, smiled in return. As much as he looked like one of the trolls Etta used to carve out of bone, she liked the man. The Organic Mechanic was the only one up here who understood them, who worked with flesh himself, understood what the Sorority did and why they were there. He was somewhat creepy… rude, crude and blunt to a fault, but Cora regarded him as a bit of an ally. He didn’t insult them. He wasn’t lewd to Cora personally anymore (although she’d had words with him about some of the younger girls). And he was always grateful to receive the dessicated liver, thyroid and other organs for his work. 

The Mechanic led them around the cabinets to a small dark corner at the far back of the Blood Shed. The thin man lying there still had clay covering his body, and next to his head lay a wide mouthed leather bag of his clotted blood. “Death rattle came on when I did late night rounds, so I had a chance to drain the last of his blood when he passed.” This was the one task The Mechanic did for them, if the blood clotted in the body, they could get far less blood meal, so when a man died with him as Witness, he would drain their blood as best he could. 

Cora took the skin of blood, and handed it off to Glenna who looped it around her shoulder. She covered the man’s head with a dark cloth, and tied it off around his neck to protect his identity. He was no longer a tool of war. He was now given back to The Citadel. Nodding at Glenna, the younger girl shifted the man so that Cora could take him onto her back. 

“Thank you” she said to the mangy haired man, and then spoke the words “Child of the earth, he will be returned to the soil to feed us all.”

That was not what the frail man had wanted of course. His wish had probably been to die historic, and feast in his promised after world. But to Cora this way was better. All matter would be recycled. He would feed his brothers, nourish the plants they fed on, his sinews would hold together his community. But the frail white smeared men never seemed to see it like that. Not that they would be able to argue by the time they encountered Cora.   
The Mechanic spoke “Hey… let me know if you have a heart you can spare. I’m giving an anatomy lesson to some of my apprentices. It would be appreciated. I’ll save you a drink.” Cora nodded. She would not say anything more to him, but he knew she would find her way up, in her own time, with the promised heart. 

Winding their way back to the stone stairway that led to the caverns, the men and boys all shrunk back to the walls from the black clad women and their burden. While they would sometimes get insults and hisses on their way out, no one came near them this day. Once they were back behind the dented metal door, both Cora & Glenna relaxed. Cora locked the door behind them, then squatted down to lay the man on a stone bench and stretched, while Glenna worked the pulley on the dumbwaiter. 

“Don’t let them get to you when they say stuff. It’s only because they’re scared of us. Well… not us, but dying like this.” She twisted side to side, using the stone walls to lean out the kinks in her back. 

“They’re creepy though.” The girl replied. “The paint, so much skin, it’s like they’re trying to be muscle bound corpses.” She wasn’t scared of the dead. But in her world the living were soft, rounded and dark skinned or rosy cheeked… and warm in all senses of the world. The men in the overworld were hard, white painted, pointy and chromed. “It’s weird.”

“I know, I know…. But if you let them see you flinch… well, their fear is our cloak.” It was true. Despite the service they performed, without which this thriving city would merely be a sterile freshwater spring, the aura of death was one of the few things that kept them from being raped and attacked. The formless black clothes that kept them warm in the cavern also kept them safe above.

The dumbwaiter platform clinked to the top and Cora heaved the body onto it. Glenna started the pulley down while Cora carefully picked her way down the winding stone stairs to the bottom, the air becoming cooler and cooler the stone walls. Tallow candles flickered in the wall sconces, but it was slow going to pick her way down the uneven steps in the dim light. By the time she reached the bottom, the elevator platform had as well and she could hear Glenna’s footfalls as she worked her way down the steps at the top. Cora moved the body off the platform into the cold stone storage vault. It was a few hard hours work to bring a body back, and she would be excused from other work until after the midday meal. Some days, that was the only thing she did anymore, was ferry bodies. The small blessing of being the largest and strongest of her sisters. Taking her leave of Glenna in the kitchens, where the girl could decompress with her friends, Cora retired to the small shared room that served as her home.

Etta was there, resting. As she was nearly always now. Cora went to her, snuggled up into the warmth that was her wife, and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Good run?” Etta asked. She had still been asleep when Cora had left that morning 

“Yeah, Glenna did well, stayed calm. It was early so there wasn’t too much to deal with. It was a good time to take her on her first trip.” On days when the men above had gone on raids, things were rarely that peaceful. Cora was not really in the mood for small talk though, she needed a nap. 

“Did you see him?” Etta continued. 

“Yeah… We didn’t talk, it was out in public. He wants a heart for something, so maybe I’ll go up this evening or tomorrow.” Her hand crept to the soft, crepey skin of Etta’s belly. “I’m tired, can we just sleep?” 

Etta whined back “Well, I’m up…” and wiggled out from under the larger woman then sat up leaning against the wall, taking Cora’s head in her lap, petting her thick black braids. “But I’m not really going anywhere.” She started absentmindedly unraveling Cora’s hair to be rebraided as she drifted off to sleep.


End file.
